Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188 View this blog in Magazine View.

Taking the article above as an example, I was browsing the list of literature cited and trying to find those articles in BioNames or BioStor. Sometimes an article that should have been found wasn't, and on closer investigation the problem was that the ZooKeys XML has mangled the citation. To illustrate, take the following XML:

Tools to find articles that rely on accurately parsed metadata, such as OpenURL, will fail in cases like this. Of course, we could use tools that don't have this requirement, but we could also fix the XML so that OpenURL resolves will succeed.

This is where the example of the journal eLife comes in. They deposit article XML in GitHub where anyone can grab it and mess with it. Let's imagine we did the same for ZooKeys, created a GitHub repository for the XML, and then edited it in cases where the article metadata is clearly broken. A viewer like mine could then fetch the XML, not from ZooKeys, but from GitHub, and thus take advantage of any corrections made.

We could imagine this as part of a broader workflow that would also incorporate other sources of articles, such as BHL. We could envisage workflows that take BHL scans, convert them to editable XML, then repurpose that content (see BHL to PDF workflow for a sketch). I like the idea that there is considerable overlap between the most recent publishing ventures (such as eLife and ZooKeys) and the goal of bringing biodiversity legacy literature to life.